Here’s a cool one: A pre-launch campaign for written content.

Well, I have officially failed my “blog every week or more” New Year’s strategy….

I thought I would share some pretty cool marketing ideas that I got from Marketo‘s campaign for their Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation. There are a lot of great elements to how Marketo launched the ebook/whitepaper, but I will just focus in on a couple. First, take a look at their pre-launch landing page:

Here is what I liked:

1. The grand-style ebook launch — Most companies create a whitepaper, post it on their site, send some nurturing emails to it, and occasionally syndicate. Marketo campaigned like they were opening Mission Impossible 4. For a piece of content!

2. Pre-registration. This is the first time I have seen written content receive a pre-registration form. We do this for events such as conferences and webinars and product announcements. This was for content, the written kind. #Respect

3. Professional Video. A 36 second freecreditreport.com-esque commercial for the definitive guide. Now, that is cool. They have a different version for post-launch as well. In b2b, we are still figuring out video. (Strike that, we are still figuring out content). This is a great result — short, appealing, watchable. But again, I am still amazed that this was a commercial for written content. I am a big fan of video on landing pages previewing content. I have seen that before with a Guy Kawasaki webinar where he basically got on and previewed the webinar…all of this on the landing page. (I am too tired to find the URL). Great idea. Here is the video: